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Re: Datepicker questions - are they useful?

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Nov 2, 2015 6:42AM

A datepicker offers some things that an input field does not, such as
the ability to quickly select a date which falls on a given day of the
week.
Also it gives the aplication a way to restrict the dates available
)for some internal reason such as expiration date of offer, staff
availability etc.) and thus minimize the chance of users dealing with
error conditions on the form.
Usually datepickers are offered as an optional control to date input
fields, so this way you give the user best of both worlds.
A key to making datepickers useful on desktop is to set them up in an
accessible table or, better yet, offer keyboard shortcuts that quickly
let the user explore and choose a date. After all, you do not want the
keyboard only user to have to wear down his tabkey to get to December
12th, 2015 by tabbing through each date until then.

One accessible datepicker implementation is available at
https://dequeuniversity.com/resources (where you can download and play
with the code, it is written using JQuery).
The actual JQuery datepicker had a lot of accessibility issues last
time I looked (that was some months ago).
I think the 3 dropdown aproach is not bad either. As a user I have
found that to be a safe and relatively easy option, but that is the
opinion of a single (well, married) screen reader user. It might be a
nightmare for people with cognitive disabilities, I don't know.
And, yes, please use the html5 datatypes for mobile devices.
It make a ton of difference to get the appropriate UI or keyboard
option up when entering values in a mobile environment (such as the @
symbol on the main keyboard for type="email"). That should be better
for all users.
Cheers
-Birkir



On 11/2/15, _mallory < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 02, 2015 at 07:56:46AM -0500, Mary Elizabeth Sullivan wrote:
>>
>> - is a sequence of drop downs better?
>
> This is the only one I can really reply to, though I also personally
> dislike graphical date pickers (mostly because everything's too small
> and hard to choose, though I do like *seeing* the dates on a
> calendar), and that is:
> please check and user-test and check again if you go for the multi-
> dropdown route. It's physically very easy to screw these up as a user
> since your focus stays on the input while you may now think you've
> switched to scrolling the page. Gov.uk should have some statistics
> on this as I recall Anna Bartlett? giving a talk about all the problems
> they've seen with select tags.
>
> There's also the issue of having three inputs for what mentally we
> consider a single value, the date. Using dropdowns is simply easier
> for the back-end to check validity, but I can't say they're an
> improvement for the front-end.
>
> _mallory
> > > > >


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